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Version 1.9 Build 803

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(c) scientific priorities

Some types of interaction with applications are still lacking.

• A systematic approach to state saving and restoration is missing.
• Application state cannot be easily attached to a product such as a MeasurementSet or Image.
• One cannot pass new values of parameters to a running application.
• One cannot interrupt an application other than by killing it.
• Switching between applications is clumsy.
• Context sensitive inputs and help are missing
• Unset is not propagated uniformly e.g. image does have unsets that are trapped in the Glish side of the interface whereas other applications use special values for unset.
• History information is not built up.

The main GUI interface is basically satisfactory. The scheme of an autogui controlled by meta-information seems to work for many different contexts. The Copy-Paste idiom for passing information around seems to be viable for simple entities. One problem is that the GUI widgets are incomplete. We need a wide range of more useful widgets:

• General Measures widget or connection to measures gui
• General Quanta widget or connection to quanta gui
• Selection widgets to fill in queries for certain types of table e.g. MeasurementSets, Calibration tables.
• Time specification widgets

Passing information around the user interface is still quite clumsy. For example, to get a region from an image on disk requires far too many operations. Part of this is due to the confusion between e.g. disk image file or Glish image tool. One obvious approach is that since we know the type of a table (e.g. Image, MeasurementSet, Calibration), we should automatically open the corresponding tool when an image is needed; Thus the catalog should be extended to show the connection between a Table and the corresponding tool. In general, converting from a data file to a tool should be a one-click operation both in the catalog and in the spanner.

We are still missing a high-level concept to bind the interface together. We've called this a workspace in previous discussions.